5 8 LLOYD'S NATURAL HISTORY. 



This Moth, which is found at Natal, Delagoa Bay, and other 

 parts of South-eastern Africa, measures about two inches across 

 the wings. It is black ; the thorax is clothed with luteous 

 hair, and the fore-wings are marked with five or six large 

 yellowish-white spots, and some smaller ones ; on the hind- 

 wings there are two interrupted yellowish- white bands. 



GENUS HECATESIA. 



Hecatesia^ Boisduval, Mon. Zyg. p. n (1829); id. Rev. Zool. 

 (3) ii. p. 48 (1874) ; Westwood, Trans. Linn. Soc. Lond. 

 Zool. (2) i. p. 199 (1877). 



We may here notice a curious Australian genus, which is 

 usually r-iaced in the Agaristidce, but which Westwood referred, 

 with doubt, to the Castniidce, on account of the presence of an 

 accessory cell on the fore-wings, a character, however, which 

 it shares with many genera of Agaristida. In Hecatesia the 

 antennae are gradually, but considerably, thickened before the 

 tips. The fore-wings are striped or spotted with white or 

 yellow, and the hind-wings are orange, with broad black bor- 

 ders. The abdomen is comparatively short and stout, but is 

 distinctly tufted at the extremity, and the thorax and palpi 

 are very hairy. In the male, the fore-wing is dilated by a horny 

 vitreous sub-costal lunule, transversely striated, and forming a 

 stridulating organ. This forces the sub-costal nervules almost 

 together beneath it. On the fore-wings, the median and sub- 

 median nervures spring from a common stalk. This curious 

 stridulating apparatus is also found, though less conspicuously 

 developed, in some of the species of sEgocera, Latreille, a 

 genus containing several Indian and African species, which 

 have brown or reddish fore-wings, traversed by a broad longi- 

 tudinal white bar, generally interrupted twice, and yellow hind- 

 wings, bordered with black, brown, or, more rarely, reddish. 



